Features

Provides you pre-built rules to evaluate your AWS resource configurations and configuration changes, or create your own custom rules in AWS Lambda that define your internal best practices and guidelines for resource configurations.

Config records details of changes to your AWS resources to provide you with a configuration history, and automatically deliver it to an S3 bucket you specify.

Receive a notification whenever a resource is created, modified, or deleted.

Config enables you to record software configuration changes within your EC2 instances and servers running on-premises, as well as servers and Virtual Machines in environments provided by other cloud providers. You gain visibility into:

operating system configurations

system-level updates

installed applications

network configuration

Config can provide you with a configuration snapshot – a point-in-time capture of all your resources and their configurations.

Concepts

Configuration History

A collection of the configuration items for a given resource over any time period, containing information such as when the resource was first created, how the resource has been configured over the last month, etc.

Config automatically delivers a configuration history file for each resource type that is being recorded to an S3 bucket that you specify.

A configuration history file is sent every six hours for each resource type that Config records.

Configuration item

A record of the configuration of a resource in your AWS account. Config creates a configuration item whenever it detects a change to a resource type that it is recording.

The components of a configuration item include metadata, attributes, relationships, current configuration, and related events.

Configuration Recorder

Stores the configurations of the supported resources in your account as configuration items.

By default, the configuration recorder records all supported resources in the region where Config is running. You can create a customized configuration recorder that records only the resource types that you specify.

You can also have Config record supported types of global resources which are IAM users, groups, roles, and customer managed policies.

Configuration Snapshot

A complete picture of the resources that are being recorded and their configurations.

Stored in an S3 bucket that you specify.

Configuration Stream

An automatically updated list of all configuration items for the resources that Config is recording.

Helpful for observing configuration changes as they occur so that you can spot potential problems, generating notifications if certain resources are changed, or updating external systems that need to reflect the configuration of your AWS resources.

Configuration Item

The configuration of a resource at a given point-in-time. A CI consists of 5 sections:

Basic information about the resource that is common across different resource types.

Configuration data specific to the resource.

Map of relationships with other resources.

CloudTrail event IDs that are related to this state.

Metadata that helps you identify information about the CI, such as the version of this CI, and when this CI was captured.

Resource Relationship

Config discovers AWS resources in your account and then creates a map of relationships between AWS resources.

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